June 2, 2026 • 51 mins
Van Gogh lived a troubled life and did not garner attention as a painter until after his death by suicide. Today we dive into this complicated journey as an artist.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Cheers here too, and we all have bandages
around our heads out of sympathy for a truly great guy.
From what I can tell. Oh, yeah, let's go don
this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Oh yes, hi everyone, Hi, I'm Chuck.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Oh yeah, I'm Chuck too.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
The Deuce, What is going on? I thought you were
I thought you were Chuck de Portes.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Oh yeah, or the Ocho.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah boy, I'm trying to make ESPN jokes and it's
just not happening.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That worked, Yeah, the Spanish version of esp and I.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Got no no, I know, but I'm just saying it's
not good.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh well, I can't argue with that. Should be start over, Hey,
and welcome to the pop. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, just
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
That's right, Chuck de Portes.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Now we have to start over again. You're ready here,
We'll give everybody a little beep beep.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Can we talk about Bengo?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, that's what I was saying. We have bandages around
our heads because we are in are in solidarity. That's
what I'm trying to say with a really great guy.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, have you ever seen any of the Van Goo movies?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I watched one last night. It was a documentary, but
it was the documentary the one where David Bowie plays
Andy Warhol?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
H which one? Did Bowie play Warhol?
Speaker 2 (01:45):
In Basquiot?
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Basquiot right? Because he was also played by Crispin Glover
in the Doors and the Doors and Van Go was
played by Willem Dafoe.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That was unwatchable.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I never saw that one. It was unwatchable loving Vincent.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I think that's what it's called. Yeah, I'm almost positive
it's not because it's bad or the Dialogu's bad or
anything like that. It's just so shaky and rapid cut
and shot from weird angles to I guess represent his
mental illness that I couldn't watch it. I watched like
ten minutes, so I was like, oh no, I was disappointed.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah. I never saw that one. I did see the
one from the nineties though, the Robert Altman film.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I didn't know he did one on Are you talking
about Nashville?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, I'll shoots that's the one. No, Vincent Theo with
Tim Rothis Van Go. That was a yeah, nineteen ninety
I think it was a good.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Movie, no idea. I'll have to go back and check
that out.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, I'd like to see it again. I don't think
i've seen it since college.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I feel like a total shmoke because I don't remember
the name of the documentary, But essentially the premise of
it is the documentary went from place to place through
and just followed Van Go's life because he moved around
a lot, as we'll see, and was inspired differently by
the different places he lived. And they basically talked about
(03:11):
how those places inspired him or how they beat him
down or whatever, and then they would show you know,
his like paintings morphing into the structures that are still
there today or vice versa. It was really good. That's documentary.
They talked a lot about his life and it was good.
It's very tranquil. I think there was the same thirty
(03:33):
seconds of very tranquil string music that they used over
and over and over again. And it was not a problem.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
I think Van Go. I mean, you know, I don't
know much about art history. We've talked to we've done
quite a few shows about this kind of thing over
the years, and my appreciation for art has grown sort
of in lockstep. I've always sort of liked Vango's stuff,
for sure, but I like him even more now that
I kind of understand that, you know, he never well,
(04:02):
I mean, most people, if they know anything about van
Go know he never gained fame in his lifetime. But
he certainly never tried to achieve fame as an artist
by like painting what he thought people might want to see.
He always painted what he you know, his surroundings and
like you said, depending on where he lived, that varied,
and also it seems like really from the heart and
(04:22):
his deep, deep emotions, which I have a lot of
respect for.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, in that sense, he was a pioneer. The same
for me too. By the way, I really came to
like him even more. I think we both came from
the same exact spot and ended up in about the
same exact spot too.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Look at us.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
One thing I saw that kind of explained him to me,
at least, was that he wanted to share the things
he saw, the beauty he saw everywhere with the world,
because it was so beautiful. He wanted to provide that
to the world, not in any kind of egotistical way
or anything like that, but just like, this is so pretty.
I'm going to try my best to express how this
(05:00):
makes me feel and show the world. And then very
sadly the world was like, that's not very good. We
don't want now. Thanks for sharing, but keep it to yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, that's tough, I mean. In fact, in one letter
to his brother Theo, he said his allaying anxiety was
how can I be of use in the world? And
his you know, what he came to was to be
an artist, and that he really thought that had and
he was right, had a lot of value and that's
how he would serve in a way.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Right right, kind of cool. But before he became an artist,
he pinged around here or there. He's a little aimless
for a little while. And he was born in eighteen
fifty three in the nether Lens or Dare, near Lenz,
say Holland. Sure his father was Theodorus or I guess
it'd be Teo Doris van Goch, that's the correct way
(05:52):
to say it. And I went back and I didn't
listen to it, but I read the transcript from our
episode seven No Waight five mysteries of the art world.
Were we talked about man go a lot, and you
correctly said his name. I think here or there or through.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I probably was, Yeah, I think I was probably making
a joke from a Woody Allen movie.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
As a matter of fact, you were. That's exactly what
you mentioned that.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, yeah, that was a funny part, Ben Goch.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
But the transcription, the AI transcribing it kept saying Van God.
So I could tell that you were saying Van Goh.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay, oh, I thought you were going to say. The
AI transcription canceled what I said about Woody Allen. No, No,
that'd be useful.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Ill it's coming, don't worry.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah. So yeah, born in eighteen fifty three, Like you said,
he had a bunch of siblings. He had five younger siblings,
Theo the most notable because, as you'll see, they had
a very tight relationship and working relationship, which is why
Robert Altman made the movie Vincent and Theo. THEO was
younger by four years. Vincent was, you know, apparently a
(06:58):
pretty moody, tough kid, and as we'll see, he certainly
suffered from mental illness throughout his life, but his parents
didn't know what to do with him. So they sent
him to boarding school for about four years from twelve
to sixteen, at which point he was like, you know what,
I'm going to get involved in the art worlds in
the way of being sort of like an apprentice to
(07:19):
a dealer, and he learned about the sales side.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, I get the impression he kind of fell into
the art world because it was almost a family business selling.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Art, was the impression.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it later, right.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah, I think you're probably right.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
So he worked there for I think seven years, yeah,
until about age twenty three, and this was it was
during this period that he fell into what I think
is viewed as his first true episode of depressions, about
of real depression, and it followed on the heels of
a I didn't see exactly what it was. Livia helped
(07:59):
us with. She just describes it as a romantic disappointment.
But that seems to be a trend throughout his life
where he did not he was not lucky in love.
I think the Little River Band would have called him
the lonesome loser in that respect, and that would trigger
some of his depressive episodes. But as a result, his
(08:20):
uncle or whoever ran his uncle's art dealership was like, sorry,
you're fired.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, so we lost that job. But he did learn
about the world of art and sort of the business
of art, even though he didn't, like I say, kind
of cowtow to the business side of things. He got
interested in religion for a little while after that job
and was a I guess an unordained or unlicensed preacher
for about four years. He never got a theology degree
(08:48):
or anything, but he did this work, sort of missionary
work in Belgium and sort of the poorest parts of
Belgium and cold country at the time, and he wanted
to you know, very admir didn't want to put on airs,
and he lived as the people around him lived, and
was very open and shared what he had with his parishioners.
(09:09):
But the church wasn't wild about that idea. I think
they thought it was sort of beneath the parish. So
he got fired from that job as a preacher.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, And I have the impression that he was taking
steps to maybe please his father and just trying to
throw himself into religion because he wanted something. He wanted
some sort of connection to something bigger than him, and
I guess that was just the easiest thing to try.
But also his father, remember he was a Dutch minister,
so yeah, I could see him doing that, and then
(09:38):
he kind of failed at that, So that probably didn't
sit all that well.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
I mean, isn't that kind of the story of a
lot of people, like boys trying to please daddy who
didn't approve of them.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, that's why I became a podcaster. My dad told
me when I was like seven, He's like, I will
never respect you unless you grow up to be a podcaster.
And I was like, I can do that. He said,
a good one, and I went.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, right. I remember my dad at one point suggested
I've become a mail carrier when I was sort of aimless, just.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Like Henry CHENASKI government.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Job, good benefits, you could do worse. He was absolutely right,
there's nothing wrong with the job. I just wasn't so
interested in that.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
So yeah, so he failed to please his father, if
that's what he was doing, But he kind of we
all did exactly right well put. But he he was
struck by his time in Belgium coal country and he
hopped out of there for a little while. But he
would kind of carry with him, as we'll see, once
he became an artist, you know, this appreciation or at
(10:40):
least kind of this need to shine a spotlight on
the toil and the suffering of his fellow humans because
he cared about them and he thought other people should
care about him too.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, for sure. I mean he definitely carried around socialist ideas.
He started to actually study painting because, like I said,
he had written that letter, THEO saying that he wanted
to become an artist to try and serve the world
and bring the beautiful art. So he thought, you know,
maybe I should study this stuff. Off and on. He
lived with his parents, but that never worked out very well,
(11:12):
as that happened sometimes in real life. He found them
fairly suffocating, and so he would sort of move around
in between the Netherlands in Belgium for a period of years.
That's not to say his family as a whole didn't
support him, because THEO, as we'll see, was always very supportive.
He was working in the art world. He worked for
a big dealer, and he was very sort of hip
(11:35):
to the art scene. THEO was and you know what
was moving and he would end up representing not only
his brother who was not popular, but other artists who
were not popular in critical circles like Monet and Goga
and old latrec are to Louse Latrek.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, like his brother had that foresight that was like
these new impressionist guys, I like what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah, I mean, he knew it up.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
But he also very importantly saw, like, my brother actually
has something here. This is a good decision that he
became an artist. It was not at all patronizing, even
though Tale THEO was his patron which is kind of confusing.
He genuinely believed in his brother's ability, and he very
happily was like, I'm going to give you a monthly
(12:21):
allowance that I saw was about equal to a minimum
wage what somebody would earn minimum wage. And it kept him.
It kept Vincent in the art supplies. I think he
spent eighty percent of it on art supplies and the
other twenty percent on just living. But he was able
to live like that and just produce art, and that's
what THEO wanted.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah, and Vincent said, don't patronize me. And he said,
well that's tricky because technically I am exactly And that
was about twenty percent of theo's income, So it was
not you know, chicken scratch. Why wasn't making it a
ton of money himself. His cousin was also very supportive
of him in the way of teaching him. His name
was Anton mauv and he literally, quite literally taught him
(13:06):
like how to paint with oil, how to paint with watercolors,
and he had that. I guess it was that same
uncle who he worked for, would commission works and pay
him occasionally to like, you know, paint stuff for him.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, it's like in art circles. Van Go was like
very frequently cited as like only having sold one painting
during his life. Yeah, that's not correct, not exactly, but
if you you know, if you want to get technical,
he sold several paintings, but they were like family and
friends and stuff like that. He did sell one painting
to one person he wasn't an acquaintance of. That's true.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, for sure, we're gonna be myth busting a little
bit along the way because van Go, it seems like,
more so than other artists, had a lot of kind
of falsehoods bandied about over the years. Is that fair
to say I get.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
To wear the Beret this time.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Okay, So, like you said, he never had a whole
lot of luck with the lady, had a sort of
a series of disappointments there, but eventually he would have
about a year and a half relationship with a woman
named Cien Hornick. This was in eighteen eighty two. She
(14:15):
was pregnant at the time and also had a five
year old daughter. Was a former sex worker, which his
family didn't like any of this, and his father tried
to get him I guess committed to an asylum, but
you know, Venko was having none of it. He was
in love.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
No, but it would get easier and easier to have
him committed as time went on. I guess this is
just the first attempt and it didn't take so. Like
I said, he was kind of taken with the idea
of peasants, people toiling people growing their own food or
making their own living from the land, which he was
infatuated with the land in nature in general. He's almost
(14:54):
a transcendentalist, I guess, without quite knowing it. And he
when he moved back with his parents and then was
bouncing back and forth between Belgium and the Netherlands for
a little while he was mostly doing studies and paintings
of peasants, and one of his most famous paintings came
out of this time. One of his first masterpieces, called
(15:16):
The Potato Eaters, was a study of I think five
peasants sitting around a table eating potatoes, drinking coffee, and
it's like in hughes of Brown's. Essentially. He said in
a letter to THEO that he wanted it to basically
be the color of a potato unpeeled. Of course, it's
how we put it, and he nailed it. It's also
(15:39):
it's bleak and grim in away but at the same
time the people almost appear noble, but they're blocky and
cartoonish almost as far as their forms go. And that
was all intentional, but everybody was like, this is terrible.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah, people didn't love it. He was sending these paintings
to THEO to like, hey man, so these and hopefully
that can kind of help pay you back, but he
couldn't sell any of them at the time, and he
took him to the art market in Paris there but
no one was into that. You know, his sort of
I don't want to say dower, but I guess it
was fairly gloomy, just his color palette. At least this
(16:16):
would all change though. In eighteen eighty five his father
died and he painted you know very much in tribute
to his father, something called still Life with Bible, which
has showed sort of the contrast between himself and his
father and their ideals, because obviously the open Bible on
the table was representing his father. But there was also
(16:37):
another novel, Lajois de vive, and it was a socialist
book by a socialist writer named Emil I guess Zola,
and it was like, you know, here's a contrast between
my father and I. I paint this in tribute, but
I got to get out of here now. Like he
needed a change in his life. I think because of
his father's passing, he wanted to move.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, and he definitely did. He moved to Paris and
he moved. I don't know if he moved in with THEO,
but that would be my great guess. Either way. THEO
was living and working there, and he moved to be
close to THEO, and THEO introduced him to those artists
he was wrapping in his circle, like you said, Monet
and Psro, and to loose the Trek like they were,
(17:21):
Like Van Goh was hanging out with all of these
guys and like learning from them, but at the same
time he was also impressing them too, And when he
moved to Paris, something changed and he dropped those really
gloomy colors in favor for like an increasingly bright, colorful
palette that like Paris, somehow triggered that in him.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, you know, you can never or it's easy, I guess,
rather than to go back after someone has passed and
sort of judged their work compared to where they were
in their life and think, like you can kind of
figure out things. But I guess my armchair psychology degree
would point me in the direction of like almost being
(18:06):
freed up a little bit by his father's passing as well.
I know it upset him, but I think it also
freed him up. So maybe that in the move to Paris,
even though we'll see he wasn't very much a city guy,
I don't think it was it was a coincidence that
all of a sudden things kind of brightened in his
life a little bit, or it could have just been
the ups and downs of his fragile, you know, mental state.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, it could be either, but that's a I think
you dug up an equally compelling idea. Where did you
get your armchair psychology degree?
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Just right here on my armchair?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Oh okay, well you're a credit to your armchair.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah, the right arm.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Is it a lazy boy? Is it Ethan Allen?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh? You know it's a lazy boy buddy?
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Okay. So yeah, one of the first paintings that people
are like, Look, he came out of this gloom and
doom stuff and now he likes color. The Hill of
mam mart with stone quarry, Uh is not part of
the title. That was just me. But that was painted
in eighteen eighty six. And here's the thing that you
(19:08):
should know about Van go He was he started painting
in twenty age twenty seven. He died at thirty seven.
In between that time he painted almost nine hundred paintings,
many many, many of them masterpieces. So in a ten
year period, everything you know about Van Goh happened. And
(19:31):
really you can kind of narrow it down to essentially
the last three years of his life that were the
most productive, where he really came into his own.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yeah, that website you sent kind of broke down his
productivity by location, and his five years in the Netherlands
he painted about four paintings a month, so two hundred
and forty five. A couple of years in Paris painted
two hundred and twenty seven, so ten paintings per month.
His fourteen months, as we'll see in What would That be? Arless?
Is that how you pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Arl?
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Arl? Okay?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
It just sounds like you're choking on a hard boiled egg.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
About fourteen paintings a month over fourteen months, and then
salt rem is that right? Eighteen per month? And then finally, man,
he was up to a painting per day by the
time he ended up in that last place in France.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, like just a stunning number of painting and complete
oil paintings. Not like he half started wine or something
like that. These were completed paintings like that usually takes
a day and a half, not a day, right.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah. I can't paint anything. I can paint a wall.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah, I could probably paint a wall in a day.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Yeah you do. You don't have artistic talent like that either,
do you No?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
And it's always bothered me. I wanted to draw for
so long and I just can't do it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, I can't, but we can both write, so sure, yeah,
and we could both sing.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Right, we just need an extra one thousand words for
each picture. We can't both sing. Wait a minute, now,
hold on it in a compliment. I can't sing. I'm
not taking that one.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
All right. Well, we'll get you someone singing lessons and
we'll be back right after this.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
So despite moving to Paris, Chuck, we're back by the way,
he was still very much drawn to rural areas. That's
where he found his most inspiration. He liked the light
and the color out there. Although he did paint a
lot of city stuff, like a cafe terrace at night.
That's one of my favorites. There was, There were plenty
of city paintings, but far and away. He did like landscapes,
(21:51):
some seascapes, that kind of stuff, and that there was
no different in when he was in Paris. So he
really started to kind of pick up painting the land
around that time too. And then he was also inspired
by Japanese art during this time.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Yeah, for sure, those woodblock prints, which I didn't even
know what woodblock was until probably ten years ago. And
I just love the stuff. It's really pretty incredible, especially
the process. But he was inspired not to do woodblock,
but to kind of recreate that just using you know,
paint very you know, contrasting colors and bold outlines. And
(22:29):
he started and I don't know how common this is,
and you know, I know people are inspired, but he
kind of straight up copied some other people at times
in his career. And I don't think like suffered in
posthumously for that unless I'm wrong. No, okay, that was
the case. Here he recreated a Japanese wood block sudden
(22:49):
shower over shin Ohashi Bridge and Atake in eighteen eighty seven,
but again using brushstrokes.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Right, yeah, and I mean both of them are pretty impressive.
But yeah, the idea that the original by Utagawa Hiroshige
is like carved out of wood, inked and then stamped.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Is just how you know, Yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
So also in Paris, we talked about how he suffered
his first real depressive episode in his early twenties. Paris
was the point where his full blown recurring mental illness
really started to take hold. It seems like the more
he pushed himself, the more exhausted he got, the more
(23:33):
his mental illness was triggered and he could push himself.
That guy. I mean, like you said, he was painting
a painting a day, day after day after day for
a while. So yeah, yeah, he was very capable of
working until he was exhausted. So he really started doing
that around this time, eighteen eighty seven eighty eight, that
(23:54):
kind of thing. And I guess he lived in Paris
for two years and moved to Arle, which I know
is not exactly how you say it, but it's in Provence.
And I mean, dude, if you want to be like
inspired by nature, just move to Provence.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Never been there.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
I haven't either, but just from pictures I've seen on
the TV, yeah, I'm telling you it's inspiring.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah. He wanted a more chill life for sure. So
in eighteen eighty eight, that's when he split. He was
painting a little more intensely at this point, and the
colors got even more bold and his brushwork, like I
think that's one of the things he was got inspired
by from the Impressionists, was really kind of showing the
(24:39):
brushwork and all of a sudden you're getting those farm
fields and the wheat, a lot of wheat orchard stuff
like that. And then eventually he would paint a lot
of the Yellow House is what he called it, where
he lived. He lived there and he would end up
renting out rooms as we'll see, to different painters, and
(25:01):
that's where the sunflowers started too. Very famous for his
sunflower paintings.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, there's one that I saw was called the still
life version of the Mona Lisa. That's how good it is.
Another thing I didn't realize. I've seen much of his work,
but from researching this, I kept zooming into paintings that
we were talking about, and he was really good. Like
when you zoom in and look at the brushwork and
(25:26):
see what he's doing with it, it's a whole different painting.
I mean, it's Impressionism for you, but it looks so
much more childish. And I know his work was described
like that during his lifetime, from like zoomed out, like
normally how you would look at a painting, but when
you go into it, it's like such genius that it
(25:46):
almost seems like it would be difficult to make it
look childish. It's that good, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, I when I go to museums, I you know,
I make sure i'm not obnoxious about it and like
black people and stuff. But when I get a chance,
I will, I will get in there as close as
you know, allowable to really kind of look at what's
going on on a close level, and not for any
kind of obviously study for myself because they don't paint.
But there's something about it that makes it a little
more uh real, Like you can actually see like what
(26:16):
somebody was doing rather than you know, just looking at
the hole from afar.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, it definitely connects you more to the painter, for sure,
because it sinks in like somebody was standing in front
of this canvas like one hundred and fifty years ago
putting their brush to it, like that happened at one point,
you know.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yeah, for sure, I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Do you get really close and put your finger right
over and go, I'm not touching it, I'm not touching
it to the security guard.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, Well, sometimes if they're not looking at like to
chip a little piece of the paint off and just
take it as a soon here, do.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
You like stick it inside your cheek to smuggle it out?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah, so yeah, Sunflowers, that was the one that I
first really looked at and was like Oh my god,
this is way better than I thought it was. Yeah,
he started. He's also obviously very well known for starry nights,
and his first one was Starry Night over the Rhone
River in eighteen eighty eight, and his starry Nights would
(27:12):
be kind of like a gift and a curse, like
they became his most beloved works essentially, But he kind
of beat himself up about him because he's like, this
isn't quite right. But I almost get the impression that
to him, they were right, but he just he was
kind of adjusting his interpretation of them based on the
(27:33):
feedback he was getting from everybody else, Like he was
subsuming his feelings about it to everybody else's dislike of it, Like, yeah,
you're right, it's not very good kind of thing. It
seemed to be specific to those starry knights.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, And just how tough was that, as someone who
obviously was extremely talented and producing what would be some
of the most beloved works of art after his death,
to constantly be getting that feedback from art credit and
although he wasn't even on the radar really art critics,
but people who he would show to. And then his
own brother who was such a supporter, but had to
(28:08):
constantly break the news of like nobody wants to buy this.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Stuff, right, And Vincent was like, but do you have
to tell me, like verbatim, how much they said they
hated it every time? Can you just tell me you
didn't sell any of this week?
Speaker 1 (28:20):
This guy said it looked like snot on canvas. I
don't know what to tell you, right.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
And also again if you take into account Chuck that
he's not just like trying to do a still life
photo realistically and not quite getting it. So it's like
your expertise isn't that good. He's like putting himself on
the canvas and people are rejecting it. So they're rejecting
him as a human being as far as he's concerned.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah, for sure. So he's in the Yellow House that
said he would rent it out to other artists. One
of those, thanks to THEO, ended up being Go Gone
because THEO was like, hey, listen, can I pay your
expenses and you go move in with my brother because
I really think it will. I think the quote was
it'll make a big change in your life. And he,
(29:07):
you know, he was hoping that one would inspire the
other because obviously he was wrapping them both, but he
wanted good things for Vincent and that that sort of worked,
and it didn't like they were both very productive. They
painted each other's portraits very famously, but they also fought
a lot. It was just a very volatile relationship to
(29:27):
the point where on Christmas Eve eighteen eighty eight, go
Gon was already planning on leaving. This wasn't the impetus
for him to leave, but Van Go threw a glass
of absinthe in his face, which I imagine, I mean, no
liquor in your face is great. Imagine absence is probably
one of the worst ones to get thrown in your face. Shirt. Yeah,
it probably stings, I would imagine. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
So Gogan was like, I'm out of here, and he left,
and Van Goh was like, hey, you can't leave. I'm leaving,
and he threatened him with a razor. Apparently, as far
as the standard story goes, Gogan kept going and Van
Go returned to the house, used the razor to cut
(30:11):
his ear off, wrapped it up, and took it to
a sex worker at a local brothel, and was rejected
by her. From this gift was rejected by her that is,
there's some problems with that, but it's probably the correct story.
(30:31):
But there's another school thought that Gogan actually cut it
off and van Go covered for him, because Gogan was
apparently a master sword fighter, carried a sword around with him,
and it's quite possible he took Vincent's ear off for
being threatened with a razor right.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Also another version of the story, they believe they found
that the woman was actually a maid at the brothel
and not a sex worker. But those are sort of
nitpicky details. I think certainly cutting off your own ear
wouldn't beat nitpicky, because that's a you know, a true
sign of a desperate sort of sort of upset that
(31:07):
you can only feel if you're suffering from severe mental illness.
So yeah, yeah, self mutilation is super sad. And I
think there's also like some interpretations that it might have
been influenced by the bullfighting ritual where you cut off
the bulls here to present it to a lady, But
I don't know, I'm not so sure about that.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, that seems like something he would have done on
like a calm day. Then if that was the purpose
of it, to present it to a lady. That almost
seems like it was just some impulsive thing that was
tacked on to the end of something that he wasn't planning.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
You know, yeah, for sure. But the cops found him
the next day. I think he was unconscious. They obviously
went to the hospital and he was in a state
of psychosis for a few days in the hospital, and
a doctor there said, you think you have epilepsy. So
and I don't think we mentioned you know, he's suffering
from from bouts of mental illness off and on throughout
(32:05):
his life to this point, but also physical manifestations are
happening that in retrospect people are like, yeah, it wasn't
just mental illness coming out physically, Like, it seems like
he probably really did have epilepsy. So they gave him
potassium bromide, which he said, Vincent said, curled or stopped
his intolerable hallucinations, but he was still fainting a lot.
(32:30):
And he apparently didn't have any memory of what happened
with Gogon or the ear.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, so he was in that hospital for a little while.
This wasn't a psychiatric hospital, this is like a hospital hospital.
I also saw a check in that documentary that as
a gift to the doctor who cared for him, he
presented him with a painting of one of the wards
in the hospital. When doctor was like, no, thanks, it's
not very good.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
So didn't even accept it.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Did not even accept it. Oh boy, So he was
released from the hospital. He pretended he was scratching its temple,
but it was with his middle finger as he was
saying bye to the doctor. Yeah, and he started painting again.
But the hospital visit helped his epilepsy, it did not
(33:18):
help the bouts of mental illness that he just kept
suffering over and over and over again. In between he
would just work at like a breakneck pace and then
exhaust himself, have another episode of mental illness and go
to the hospital, get out work until he exhausted himself
again and again, and so finally that the hospital was like, look, man,
(33:40):
you're in the wrong place now, like you need a
different kind of care than we could offer. And so
he checked himself into a sanitarium at Saint Remi and
he was there for a year being treated and that
actually helped him quite a bit being there.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I think that's a good place for a break. Because
something very interesting happened while he was there. Is that
a good time?
Speaker 2 (34:03):
I think?
Speaker 1 (34:03):
So? All right, we'll be right back everybody. All right, everyone,
(34:24):
we're back in. I said, something very interesting happened while
he was in the sanitarium. And one thing I mentioned
earlier was he painted about eighteen paintings per month. He
produced one hundred and forty three paintings while he was
staying in this sanitarium, and one of which was not
a starry Night, but the Starry Night or just storry night.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Sure pretty impressive, huh.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
He said that he wrote in a letter I guess
that to his sister Wilhelmina, about him wanting to make
a starry night, and then in the the next breath,
he recommends she read Walt Whitman's poetry. And people went
and read song to myself and said, there's like two
stanzas in here that basically describe what starry Night looks like.
(35:12):
We think that Walt women essentially inspired this painting, and
that seems to be the consensus.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Yeah, And if you've never seen Starry Night, you should.
All you have to do is go to the Museum
of Modern Art in New York City and walk around
until you see crowds of people.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, they said it's their most visited painting in their
whole collection.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Yeah, it's uh, that one's you can't get close anyway,
but it's tough to even to get a great view period.
It's just there's a lot, a lot of folks around
that one.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Wow. Wow, Yeah, I would love to see that one.
I don't believe I ever have them.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Have you not seen that one?
Speaker 2 (35:47):
I don't believe. So I've been to MoMA, But that
seems like weird that I wouldn't have seen it. But
then again, why didn't I form a memory of seeing it?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Well, you also don't like crowds of people, so maybe
you were like, I don't know what's going on over there,
but no, thanks.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Well that is possible. But yeah, so I have seen
it on the internet at very least, if not in person.
And it's got swirls in it that represent the wind,
like the stars are huge and out of proportion and glowing.
The moon is all odd and it's like a landscape
at night. But he just captured all of it so perfectly,
(36:19):
and it's all a very it's the backgrounds very dark,
dark blues and stuff like that, but it's a very
soothing like happy painting. And this was what I was
talking about earlier that even THEO is like this, I
don't like this man, and I guess Vincent wrote that
he was once again allowing myself to do stars too big.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, he said, the search for style takes away the
real sentiment of things, which sounds a little bit like
a not form over fashion fashion over form or something
I don't know, like like just trying to make something
super stylistic, but it doesn't really mean anything, which I'm
sure cut pretty deeply. So while this is going on,
(37:04):
he you know, is continuing to kind of slip up
and down on his as far as his mental illness
is concerned. At some point he started to like eat paint.
Some people thought it might have been a suicidal thing,
but it might have also been pika as part of
his mental illness, which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
There's a legend that it was yellow paint that he
wanted to be happy inside, which doesn't I don't think.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Hold up, Yeah, Okay, Well, he because partially because of
that he stayed away from paint altogether for a little while,
because he also had a lot of like many many
drawings throughout his career and this is his drawing period.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, I like, way more drawings than paintings.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right, Oh, I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
So THEO and he got married I think in eighteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Maybe that sounds right to a woman named.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Joe Bonger or Boninger, who would eventually play a really
pivotal role in Vincent van Go's posthumous life. And they
honored him by naming their son, their only child, Vincent,
after the kid's uncle. And van Go was very, very
touched by this, and he painted one of my I
(38:16):
think one of the most beautiful paintings he ever did,
Almond Blossom.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I agree, buddy, it's great.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, just go look it up. It's very much in
like the Japanese style for sure. Yeah. And he painted
it for the baby, and like, despite you know, years
and decades of van Go paintings being sold by the family,
that one did not go up for sale, and it's
even in the van Go Museum still today.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Yeah. The baby didn't want it either though.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
He said, this is not very good.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Give up, spit up on it. I always hated bit term.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
It's a pretty bad term.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah. So THEO officially said, you know what, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna start really submitting your paintings, like I think
you are good and nobody knows it. So he started
really submitting at a more sort of serious rapid pace
in eighteen eighty eight, specifically at the annual Cilon de Independent.
(39:13):
In eighteen ninety, and this is just a few months
before Van Gowit would die. He was still not getting
any almost any attention, but finally in January that year
he started to get a little bit of not critical
like praise, but just people like critics looking at his
stuff and writing about his stuff. The first one, I
(39:35):
think was an art critic name Albert Aurier who published
I think the very first man Go Review, and he
said they initially appear strange, intense and feverish, but reflected
the continual search for the most essential sign of each thing.
So he was kind of getting it.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
I think, yeah, he was digging him. Yes. And then
in eighteen so I think eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty nine,
and eighteen ninety his work thanks to Theo, appeared in
the Salon in Paris. He was also featured in a
Belgian salon called le vent the twenty and this is
(40:12):
where he sold his first, his or his one and
only painting to somebody he didn't really.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Know, right, Yeah, it was a painter, another painter named
Anna Bach, and she bought the Red Vineyard, and that
I think maybe, well, I don't know if that was
the impetus, but that's when things started to pick up
a little bit. I think later that spring, the salon
showed ten of his paintings, which was a big deal.
(40:39):
May of that year, May of eighteen ninety and this
was after a year being in the sanitarium. He finally
was discharged and that's where he moved to a pretty
quiet place not too far from Paris, where he had
a good doctor on hand who was able to kind
of keep up with them. And that doctor was like, hey, man,
you know what you need to do is paint like
(41:00):
you seem to be doing best when you're really concentrating
on the painting, so you should do that. And he did.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, he threw himself into it again. Like you were saying,
that last few months or the last year, he was
painting about a painting a day, and I've seen it,
like people say, almost as if he knew like his
time was running out and he wanted to get as
much out as he could. He focused a lot on
wheat fields, which he said earlier was one of his
favorite subjects. Apparently that represented like the sewing and the
(41:28):
reaping of it was like renewal and death and life
and birth and all that to him. And he was,
I guess pretty close to Paris and over and he
went and traveled once to visit THEO, and he found
that THEO was talking about going out, striking out on
his own, setting up his own art dealership, and Vincent
(41:50):
was like, man, that is to himself, he thought, this
is quite a risky gamble. You know what's going to
happen to my monthly stipend is that in jeopardy. But
also that will automatically make me a burden to my brother, Like,
even if he becomes successful, it's not going to be overnight.
And in that time between him taking this big risk
(42:11):
and becoming a success, I'm going to be an even
bigger burden than I am. That was something he.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Concluded, Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that was in July
of eighteen ninety and later that month, on July twenty seventh,
he shot himself in the chest and took his own life.
We covered that in more detail in the what was
it Mysteries of the Art world?
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah seven, no, wait five Mysteries of the Art twenty
twenty white.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah, so you can go get that full story there.
But yeah, it was I think they He didn't die immediately,
and THEO made it from Paris to be there with
him when he died a couple of days later.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Which is so sweet. I mean they were so tight.
They're actually buried next to one another in that town.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah. Tight, but also fraud. You know, there a lot
of arguing stuff too, but.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
That's brother but that was mostly from Vincent's side, right.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Well, I mean I just you know, saw it could
be a rough relationship, but again as brothers and also
business partners, and one had a real tough time with
mental illness, so none of it is unexpected.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
So again, it's very much bandied about that Van Goh
was unknown and unappreciated in his time, and generally that's true.
But like when he was showing at the salons, other
painters like Monet would say to Theo, like, tell your
brother that his was the best work at the salon,
like he's great. He had a claim with people who
(43:38):
knew what they were talking about, but generally he didn't.
The reason why we know of him today and the
reason why his genius is seen and valued is because
of Joe Bonger, his sister in law, who very shortly,
I think six months after Vincent died. THEO died. Some
(43:58):
say of a broken heart, some say of siphus, some
say of both, and she inherited like all of essentially
all of Vincent van Gogo's paintings.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, I mean this is kind of the h in
a way, sort of the hero of the story here,
because now with THEO gone and Vincent still having not
achieved great fame, you're left with Joe to do something.
And you know, she was like, listen, I don't have
a background in this. This was my husband's line. So
(44:30):
she taught herself. She devoted to herself to studying art.
She devoted herself to studying the business of art, and
she really worked tirelessly to after his death, raise his profile.
And I get the impression that wasn't like, oh, I
got all these paintings so I can get a lot
of money. It was like to honor someone she thought
(44:51):
was really talented.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yes, absolutely, Yeah, she wanted to make sure that he
was appreciated finally, even if it wasn't in his lifetime.
She she had a hard time going at first, like
she still couldn't quite convince people. I guess she was
just being like, look see it's good, it's good, and
that wasn't taking. So she went through the letters between
THEO and Vincent that THEO had kept and realized, like
(45:14):
he talks van Goh talks a lot about like his
style is technique, his inspiration, his mental health struggles in
these letters and she was like, this is how you
interpret Vincent Vango's work. You understand his background, his biography,
his struggles, and that now is just so commonplace and ubiquitous.
That's just part of learning about art. And this is
(45:36):
where it came from. It came from Joe Bonger trying
to get people to understand Vincent van Gogh.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, which is I never knew that. It's a super
cool kind of cherry on this story that when you
go and you read about the artists and that just
adds so much more to it. That came from her idea,
which is pretty amazing. She got up initially a critic
named Jan Veth who did not love the pay. But
then after the letters, that's when Yan came around and
(46:04):
was swayed and was like, he really quote seeks the
raw root of things. And I think, you know, once
they knew this story, they were like, oh my gosh,
this is this tortured human that put everything into these
paintings and now I'm seeing them in a different light.
And that was that was it. I think. Since her
death in nineteen twenty five, you know, his paintings have
sold to the tune of about one hundred and seventeen
(46:25):
million dollars. The bang Go Museum there in Amsterdam, which
I have been to, it's well worth a trip, opened
in nineteen seventy three, gets a couple of million visitors
every year, and he's one of the most famous painters
of all time. Now.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Yeah, and one of the reasons why I saw was
because he wore his heart on his sleeve. He did
the same thing with his painting, and people just connect
with that. And I mean, just from listening to this Chuck,
I imagine a lot of people were like, yeah, he
really was kind of a neat guy. Yeah, a tortured
artist too. And that's another place where this kind of
came from. The idea of somebody suffering for their art
(47:05):
and their art being great because of their struggles with
mental illness. That also kind of came from the profile
of van Go being raised at the same time. And
over time people have been like, well, what did he
suffer from? Specifically? We don't really know, but there are
some clues here there that kind of point in a
(47:25):
couple of directions.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah, for sure, I think everyone agrees, like I said earlier,
that he was epileptic, but you know, probably bipolar disorder
is what a lot of people agree on. Possibly schizophrenia.
You know, he talked about hallucinations and stuff like that.
He also drank a lot, which definitely did not help
along the way. He did not in his like previous
(47:50):
family history at least as far as anyone knows, have
a long documented history of mental illness, but one of
his sisters was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was in an
asylum I think a few years after Vincent died. And
he had a brother named Cornelius who died in South
Africa while serving in the army, and it is speculated
(48:13):
that he may have taken his own life as well.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Right, you have a ten percent chance of having schizophrenia
if one of your siblings doesn't. For people in general population,
it's just one percent, So that definitely increased the possibility.
Before we finished, Chuck, I just want to briefly mention
that anecdote that was in that one article I sent
you about that cafe being foreclosed on with all of
(48:36):
his paintings trapped inside. Oh yeah, so he was showing
like I think they said, one hundred paintings or something
in this cafe. It was like an exhibit of van
Go like early van Go stuff when he first moved
to Paris, and the cafe owner like wasn't making their payments,
so the cafe got foreclosed on, locked up, and everything inside,
including Vango's paintings, which were not owned by the cafe,
(48:58):
were auctioned off, and they were so disliked that they
were bundled together in bunches of ten so that people
who bought them could go and scrape the paintings off
and sell them at a higher price than they bought
the ten van Goes for as blank canvases. Wow, And
he still was just like, well, I guess I needed
(49:19):
to just get up and dust myself up. Yeah, he
was like the Joe Dirt of the nineteenth century French
and Dutch art world. I never saw that same thing.
He was essentially a van Go. Okay, all right, okay,
thanks for humoring me with that one.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
Because that's just I love it. Good story.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
All right, Well, Chuck said that was a good story,
So I think we should end this on a high
note and go straight to listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
This is about the seven thirty seven macs. Hey, guys,
love the show. Been listening for a few years. I'm
an embedded control software engineer, not for Boeing, but in
another industry where mistakes could kill people. For me, Boeing
was allway an aspirational company, so watching the news on
mcast was like meaning a disappointing drunk hero. At the time,
(50:07):
my peers and I were following the news and doing
our best to read between the lines. We were frankly
disgusted to see that they actually deployed a single point
of failure all the way to production. It was baffling
to us because we knew our internal processes would have
stopped a program dead with that much risk. Surely Boeing
held even higher standards. It was clear that a complete
cultural and ethical breakdown occurred to allow the mcast to
(50:29):
exist without redundancy and sensor voting or rationality checks and
voting as in quotes. Even worse, they allowed a helper
system enough control authority to destabilize the vehicle. It's antithetical
to the control's engineering title anyway. Certainly didn't expect to
reignite professional rage on my commute today. Guys. So that
(50:52):
was a ten out of ten episode, and that is
from Travis. Last name withheld nice.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Travis, somebody who knows that they're talking about gave us
a ten out of ten.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
Chuck, Yeah, that always feels nice.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
I assume there's a would recommend after that, I hope.
So I'm going to assume that Travis works in the
law and dart industry.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Right there you go.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
If you want to be like Travis and send us
an awesome email because you're an expert and something we
talked about. We love that kind of stuff. Even if
you're like you guys kind of got this wrong, that's
all right, We want to hear from you. Send us
an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Cheers here too, and we all have bandages
around our heads out of sympathy for a truly great guy.
From what I can tell. Oh, yeah, let's go don
this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Oh yes, hi everyone, Hi, I'm Chuck.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Oh yeah, I'm Chuck too.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
The Deuce, What is going on? I thought you were
I thought you were Chuck de Portes.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Oh yeah, or the Ocho.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah boy, I'm trying to make ESPN jokes and it's
just not happening.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That worked, Yeah, the Spanish version of esp and I.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Got no no, I know, but I'm just saying it's
not good.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh well, I can't argue with that. Should be start over, Hey,
and welcome to the pop. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, just
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
That's right, Chuck de Portes.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Now we have to start over again. You're ready here,
We'll give everybody a little beep beep.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Can we talk about Bengo?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, that's what I was saying. We have bandages around
our heads because we are in are in solidarity. That's
what I'm trying to say with a really great guy.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, have you ever seen any of the Van Goo movies?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I watched one last night. It was a documentary, but
it was the documentary the one where David Bowie plays
Andy Warhol?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
H which one? Did Bowie play Warhol?
Speaker 2 (01:45):
In Basquiot?
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Basquiot right? Because he was also played by Crispin Glover
in the Doors and the Doors and Van Go was
played by Willem Dafoe.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That was unwatchable.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I never saw that one. It was unwatchable loving Vincent.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I think that's what it's called. Yeah, I'm almost positive
it's not because it's bad or the Dialogu's bad or
anything like that. It's just so shaky and rapid cut
and shot from weird angles to I guess represent his
mental illness that I couldn't watch it. I watched like
ten minutes, so I was like, oh no, I was disappointed.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah. I never saw that one. I did see the
one from the nineties though, the Robert Altman film.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I didn't know he did one on Are you talking
about Nashville?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, I'll shoots that's the one. No, Vincent Theo with
Tim Rothis Van Go. That was a yeah, nineteen ninety
I think it was a good.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Movie, no idea. I'll have to go back and check
that out.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, I'd like to see it again. I don't think
i've seen it since college.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I feel like a total shmoke because I don't remember
the name of the documentary, But essentially the premise of
it is the documentary went from place to place through
and just followed Van Go's life because he moved around
a lot, as we'll see, and was inspired differently by
the different places he lived. And they basically talked about
(03:11):
how those places inspired him or how they beat him
down or whatever, and then they would show you know,
his like paintings morphing into the structures that are still
there today or vice versa. It was really good. That's documentary.
They talked a lot about his life and it was good.
It's very tranquil. I think there was the same thirty
(03:33):
seconds of very tranquil string music that they used over
and over and over again. And it was not a problem.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
I think Van Go. I mean, you know, I don't
know much about art history. We've talked to we've done
quite a few shows about this kind of thing over
the years, and my appreciation for art has grown sort
of in lockstep. I've always sort of liked Vango's stuff,
for sure, but I like him even more now that
I kind of understand that, you know, he never well,
(04:02):
I mean, most people, if they know anything about van
Go know he never gained fame in his lifetime. But
he certainly never tried to achieve fame as an artist
by like painting what he thought people might want to see.
He always painted what he you know, his surroundings and
like you said, depending on where he lived, that varied,
and also it seems like really from the heart and
(04:22):
his deep, deep emotions, which I have a lot of
respect for.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, in that sense, he was a pioneer. The same
for me too. By the way, I really came to
like him even more. I think we both came from
the same exact spot and ended up in about the
same exact spot too.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Look at us.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
One thing I saw that kind of explained him to me,
at least, was that he wanted to share the things
he saw, the beauty he saw everywhere with the world,
because it was so beautiful. He wanted to provide that
to the world, not in any kind of egotistical way
or anything like that, but just like, this is so pretty.
I'm going to try my best to express how this
(05:00):
makes me feel and show the world. And then very
sadly the world was like, that's not very good. We
don't want now. Thanks for sharing, but keep it to yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, that's tough, I mean. In fact, in one letter
to his brother Theo, he said his allaying anxiety was
how can I be of use in the world? And
his you know, what he came to was to be
an artist, and that he really thought that had and
he was right, had a lot of value and that's
how he would serve in a way.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Right right, kind of cool. But before he became an artist,
he pinged around here or there. He's a little aimless
for a little while. And he was born in eighteen
fifty three in the nether Lens or Dare, near Lenz,
say Holland. Sure his father was Theodorus or I guess
it'd be Teo Doris van Goch, that's the correct way
(05:52):
to say it. And I went back and I didn't
listen to it, but I read the transcript from our
episode seven No Waight five mysteries of the art world.
Were we talked about man go a lot, and you
correctly said his name. I think here or there or through.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I probably was, Yeah, I think I was probably making
a joke from a Woody Allen movie.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
As a matter of fact, you were. That's exactly what
you mentioned that.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, yeah, that was a funny part, Ben Goch.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
But the transcription, the AI transcribing it kept saying Van God.
So I could tell that you were saying Van Goh.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay, oh, I thought you were going to say. The
AI transcription canceled what I said about Woody Allen. No, No,
that'd be useful.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Ill it's coming, don't worry.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah. So yeah, born in eighteen fifty three, Like you said,
he had a bunch of siblings. He had five younger siblings,
Theo the most notable because, as you'll see, they had
a very tight relationship and working relationship, which is why
Robert Altman made the movie Vincent and Theo. THEO was
younger by four years. Vincent was, you know, apparently a
(06:58):
pretty moody, tough kid, and as we'll see, he certainly
suffered from mental illness throughout his life, but his parents
didn't know what to do with him. So they sent
him to boarding school for about four years from twelve
to sixteen, at which point he was like, you know what,
I'm going to get involved in the art worlds in
the way of being sort of like an apprentice to
(07:19):
a dealer, and he learned about the sales side.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, I get the impression he kind of fell into
the art world because it was almost a family business selling.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Art, was the impression.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it later, right.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah, I think you're probably right.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
So he worked there for I think seven years, yeah,
until about age twenty three, and this was it was
during this period that he fell into what I think
is viewed as his first true episode of depressions, about
of real depression, and it followed on the heels of
a I didn't see exactly what it was. Livia helped
(07:59):
us with. She just describes it as a romantic disappointment.
But that seems to be a trend throughout his life
where he did not he was not lucky in love.
I think the Little River Band would have called him
the lonesome loser in that respect, and that would trigger
some of his depressive episodes. But as a result, his
(08:20):
uncle or whoever ran his uncle's art dealership was like, sorry,
you're fired.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, so we lost that job. But he did learn
about the world of art and sort of the business
of art, even though he didn't, like I say, kind
of cowtow to the business side of things. He got
interested in religion for a little while after that job
and was a I guess an unordained or unlicensed preacher
for about four years. He never got a theology degree
(08:48):
or anything, but he did this work, sort of missionary
work in Belgium and sort of the poorest parts of
Belgium and cold country at the time, and he wanted
to you know, very admir didn't want to put on airs,
and he lived as the people around him lived, and
was very open and shared what he had with his parishioners.
(09:09):
But the church wasn't wild about that idea. I think
they thought it was sort of beneath the parish. So
he got fired from that job as a preacher.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, And I have the impression that he was taking
steps to maybe please his father and just trying to
throw himself into religion because he wanted something. He wanted
some sort of connection to something bigger than him, and
I guess that was just the easiest thing to try.
But also his father, remember he was a Dutch minister,
so yeah, I could see him doing that, and then
(09:38):
he kind of failed at that, So that probably didn't
sit all that well.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
I mean, isn't that kind of the story of a
lot of people, like boys trying to please daddy who
didn't approve of them.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, that's why I became a podcaster. My dad told
me when I was like seven, He's like, I will
never respect you unless you grow up to be a podcaster.
And I was like, I can do that. He said,
a good one, and I went.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, right. I remember my dad at one point suggested
I've become a mail carrier when I was sort of aimless, just.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Like Henry CHENASKI government.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Job, good benefits, you could do worse. He was absolutely right,
there's nothing wrong with the job. I just wasn't so
interested in that.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
So yeah, so he failed to please his father, if
that's what he was doing, But he kind of we
all did exactly right well put. But he he was
struck by his time in Belgium coal country and he
hopped out of there for a little while. But he
would kind of carry with him, as we'll see, once
he became an artist, you know, this appreciation or at
(10:40):
least kind of this need to shine a spotlight on
the toil and the suffering of his fellow humans because
he cared about them and he thought other people should
care about him too.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, for sure. I mean he definitely carried around socialist ideas.
He started to actually study painting because, like I said,
he had written that letter, THEO saying that he wanted
to become an artist to try and serve the world
and bring the beautiful art. So he thought, you know,
maybe I should study this stuff. Off and on. He
lived with his parents, but that never worked out very well,
(11:12):
as that happened sometimes in real life. He found them
fairly suffocating, and so he would sort of move around
in between the Netherlands in Belgium for a period of years.
That's not to say his family as a whole didn't
support him, because THEO, as we'll see, was always very supportive.
He was working in the art world. He worked for
a big dealer, and he was very sort of hip
(11:35):
to the art scene. THEO was and you know what
was moving and he would end up representing not only
his brother who was not popular, but other artists who
were not popular in critical circles like Monet and Goga
and old latrec are to Louse Latrek.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, like his brother had that foresight that was like
these new impressionist guys, I like what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah, I mean, he knew it up.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
But he also very importantly saw, like, my brother actually
has something here. This is a good decision that he
became an artist. It was not at all patronizing, even
though Tale THEO was his patron which is kind of confusing.
He genuinely believed in his brother's ability, and he very
happily was like, I'm going to give you a monthly
(12:21):
allowance that I saw was about equal to a minimum
wage what somebody would earn minimum wage. And it kept him.
It kept Vincent in the art supplies. I think he
spent eighty percent of it on art supplies and the
other twenty percent on just living. But he was able
to live like that and just produce art, and that's
what THEO wanted.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah, and Vincent said, don't patronize me. And he said,
well that's tricky because technically I am exactly And that
was about twenty percent of theo's income, So it was
not you know, chicken scratch. Why wasn't making it a
ton of money himself. His cousin was also very supportive
of him in the way of teaching him. His name
was Anton mauv and he literally, quite literally taught him
(13:06):
like how to paint with oil, how to paint with watercolors,
and he had that. I guess it was that same
uncle who he worked for, would commission works and pay
him occasionally to like, you know, paint stuff for him.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, it's like in art circles. Van Go was like
very frequently cited as like only having sold one painting
during his life. Yeah, that's not correct, not exactly, but
if you you know, if you want to get technical,
he sold several paintings, but they were like family and
friends and stuff like that. He did sell one painting
to one person he wasn't an acquaintance of. That's true.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, for sure, we're gonna be myth busting a little
bit along the way because van Go, it seems like,
more so than other artists, had a lot of kind
of falsehoods bandied about over the years. Is that fair
to say I get.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
To wear the Beret this time.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Okay, So, like you said, he never had a whole
lot of luck with the lady, had a sort of
a series of disappointments there, but eventually he would have
about a year and a half relationship with a woman
named Cien Hornick. This was in eighteen eighty two. She
(14:15):
was pregnant at the time and also had a five
year old daughter. Was a former sex worker, which his
family didn't like any of this, and his father tried
to get him I guess committed to an asylum, but
you know, Venko was having none of it. He was
in love.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
No, but it would get easier and easier to have
him committed as time went on. I guess this is
just the first attempt and it didn't take so. Like
I said, he was kind of taken with the idea
of peasants, people toiling people growing their own food or
making their own living from the land, which he was
infatuated with the land in nature in general. He's almost
(14:54):
a transcendentalist, I guess, without quite knowing it. And he
when he moved back with his parents and then was
bouncing back and forth between Belgium and the Netherlands for
a little while he was mostly doing studies and paintings
of peasants, and one of his most famous paintings came
out of this time. One of his first masterpieces, called
(15:16):
The Potato Eaters, was a study of I think five
peasants sitting around a table eating potatoes, drinking coffee, and
it's like in hughes of Brown's. Essentially. He said in
a letter to THEO that he wanted it to basically
be the color of a potato unpeeled. Of course, it's
how we put it, and he nailed it. It's also
(15:39):
it's bleak and grim in away but at the same
time the people almost appear noble, but they're blocky and
cartoonish almost as far as their forms go. And that
was all intentional, but everybody was like, this is terrible.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah, people didn't love it. He was sending these paintings
to THEO to like, hey man, so these and hopefully
that can kind of help pay you back, but he
couldn't sell any of them at the time, and he
took him to the art market in Paris there but
no one was into that. You know, his sort of
I don't want to say dower, but I guess it
was fairly gloomy, just his color palette. At least this
(16:16):
would all change though. In eighteen eighty five his father
died and he painted you know very much in tribute
to his father, something called still Life with Bible, which
has showed sort of the contrast between himself and his
father and their ideals, because obviously the open Bible on
the table was representing his father. But there was also
(16:37):
another novel, Lajois de vive, and it was a socialist
book by a socialist writer named Emil I guess Zola,
and it was like, you know, here's a contrast between
my father and I. I paint this in tribute, but
I got to get out of here now. Like he
needed a change in his life. I think because of
his father's passing, he wanted to move.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, and he definitely did. He moved to Paris and
he moved. I don't know if he moved in with THEO,
but that would be my great guess. Either way. THEO
was living and working there, and he moved to be
close to THEO, and THEO introduced him to those artists
he was wrapping in his circle, like you said, Monet
and Psro, and to loose the Trek like they were,
(17:21):
Like Van Goh was hanging out with all of these
guys and like learning from them, but at the same
time he was also impressing them too, And when he
moved to Paris, something changed and he dropped those really
gloomy colors in favor for like an increasingly bright, colorful
palette that like Paris, somehow triggered that in him.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Yeah, you know, you can never or it's easy, I guess,
rather than to go back after someone has passed and
sort of judged their work compared to where they were
in their life and think, like you can kind of
figure out things. But I guess my armchair psychology degree
would point me in the direction of like almost being
(18:06):
freed up a little bit by his father's passing as well.
I know it upset him, but I think it also
freed him up. So maybe that in the move to Paris,
even though we'll see he wasn't very much a city guy,
I don't think it was it was a coincidence that
all of a sudden things kind of brightened in his
life a little bit, or it could have just been
the ups and downs of his fragile, you know, mental state.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, it could be either, but that's a I think
you dug up an equally compelling idea. Where did you
get your armchair psychology degree?
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Just right here on my armchair?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Oh okay, well you're a credit to your armchair.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Yeah, the right arm.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Is it a lazy boy? Is it Ethan Allen?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh? You know it's a lazy boy buddy?
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Okay. So yeah, one of the first paintings that people
are like, Look, he came out of this gloom and
doom stuff and now he likes color. The Hill of
mam mart with stone quarry, Uh is not part of
the title. That was just me. But that was painted
in eighteen eighty six. And here's the thing that you
(19:08):
should know about Van go He was he started painting
in twenty age twenty seven. He died at thirty seven.
In between that time he painted almost nine hundred paintings,
many many, many of them masterpieces. So in a ten
year period, everything you know about Van Goh happened. And
(19:31):
really you can kind of narrow it down to essentially
the last three years of his life that were the
most productive, where he really came into his own.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yeah, that website you sent kind of broke down his
productivity by location, and his five years in the Netherlands
he painted about four paintings a month, so two hundred
and forty five. A couple of years in Paris painted
two hundred and twenty seven, so ten paintings per month.
His fourteen months, as we'll see in What would That be? Arless?
Is that how you pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Arl?
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Arl? Okay?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
It just sounds like you're choking on a hard boiled egg.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
About fourteen paintings a month over fourteen months, and then
salt rem is that right? Eighteen per month? And then finally, man,
he was up to a painting per day by the
time he ended up in that last place in France.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, like just a stunning number of painting and complete
oil paintings. Not like he half started wine or something
like that. These were completed paintings like that usually takes
a day and a half, not a day, right.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah. I can't paint anything. I can paint a wall.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah, I could probably paint a wall in a day.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Yeah you do. You don't have artistic talent like that either,
do you No?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
And it's always bothered me. I wanted to draw for
so long and I just can't do it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, I can't, but we can both write, so sure, yeah,
and we could both sing.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Right, we just need an extra one thousand words for
each picture. We can't both sing. Wait a minute, now,
hold on it in a compliment. I can't sing. I'm
not taking that one.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
All right. Well, we'll get you someone singing lessons and
we'll be back right after this.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
So despite moving to Paris, Chuck, we're back by the way,
he was still very much drawn to rural areas. That's
where he found his most inspiration. He liked the light
and the color out there. Although he did paint a
lot of city stuff, like a cafe terrace at night.
That's one of my favorites. There was, There were plenty
of city paintings, but far and away. He did like landscapes,
(21:51):
some seascapes, that kind of stuff, and that there was
no different in when he was in Paris. So he
really started to kind of pick up painting the land
around that time too. And then he was also inspired
by Japanese art during this time.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Yeah, for sure, those woodblock prints, which I didn't even
know what woodblock was until probably ten years ago. And
I just love the stuff. It's really pretty incredible, especially
the process. But he was inspired not to do woodblock,
but to kind of recreate that just using you know,
paint very you know, contrasting colors and bold outlines. And
(22:29):
he started and I don't know how common this is,
and you know, I know people are inspired, but he
kind of straight up copied some other people at times
in his career. And I don't think like suffered in
posthumously for that unless I'm wrong. No, okay, that was
the case. Here he recreated a Japanese wood block sudden
(22:49):
shower over shin Ohashi Bridge and Atake in eighteen eighty seven,
but again using brushstrokes.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Right, yeah, and I mean both of them are pretty impressive.
But yeah, the idea that the original by Utagawa Hiroshige
is like carved out of wood, inked and then stamped.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Is just how you know, Yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
So also in Paris, we talked about how he suffered
his first real depressive episode in his early twenties. Paris
was the point where his full blown recurring mental illness
really started to take hold. It seems like the more
he pushed himself, the more exhausted he got, the more
(23:33):
his mental illness was triggered and he could push himself.
That guy. I mean, like you said, he was painting
a painting a day, day after day after day for
a while. So yeah, yeah, he was very capable of
working until he was exhausted. So he really started doing
that around this time, eighteen eighty seven eighty eight, that
(23:54):
kind of thing. And I guess he lived in Paris
for two years and moved to Arle, which I know
is not exactly how you say it, but it's in Provence.
And I mean, dude, if you want to be like
inspired by nature, just move to Provence.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Never been there.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
I haven't either, but just from pictures I've seen on
the TV, yeah, I'm telling you it's inspiring.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah. He wanted a more chill life for sure. So
in eighteen eighty eight, that's when he split. He was
painting a little more intensely at this point, and the
colors got even more bold and his brushwork, like I
think that's one of the things he was got inspired
by from the Impressionists, was really kind of showing the
(24:39):
brushwork and all of a sudden you're getting those farm
fields and the wheat, a lot of wheat orchard stuff
like that. And then eventually he would paint a lot
of the Yellow House is what he called it, where
he lived. He lived there and he would end up
renting out rooms as we'll see, to different painters, and
(25:01):
that's where the sunflowers started too. Very famous for his
sunflower paintings.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, there's one that I saw was called the still
life version of the Mona Lisa. That's how good it is.
Another thing I didn't realize. I've seen much of his work,
but from researching this, I kept zooming into paintings that
we were talking about, and he was really good. Like
when you zoom in and look at the brushwork and
(25:26):
see what he's doing with it, it's a whole different painting.
I mean, it's Impressionism for you, but it looks so
much more childish. And I know his work was described
like that during his lifetime, from like zoomed out, like
normally how you would look at a painting, but when
you go into it, it's like such genius that it
(25:46):
almost seems like it would be difficult to make it
look childish. It's that good, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah, I when I go to museums, I you know,
I make sure i'm not obnoxious about it and like
black people and stuff. But when I get a chance,
I will, I will get in there as close as
you know, allowable to really kind of look at what's
going on on a close level, and not for any
kind of obviously study for myself because they don't paint.
But there's something about it that makes it a little
more uh real, Like you can actually see like what
(26:16):
somebody was doing rather than you know, just looking at
the hole from afar.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, it definitely connects you more to the painter, for sure,
because it sinks in like somebody was standing in front
of this canvas like one hundred and fifty years ago
putting their brush to it, like that happened at one point,
you know.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yeah, for sure, I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Do you get really close and put your finger right
over and go, I'm not touching it, I'm not touching
it to the security guard.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, Well, sometimes if they're not looking at like to
chip a little piece of the paint off and just
take it as a soon here, do.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
You like stick it inside your cheek to smuggle it out?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah, so yeah, Sunflowers, that was the one that I
first really looked at and was like Oh my god,
this is way better than I thought it was. Yeah,
he started. He's also obviously very well known for starry nights,
and his first one was Starry Night over the Rhone
River in eighteen eighty eight, and his starry Nights would
(27:12):
be kind of like a gift and a curse, like
they became his most beloved works essentially, But he kind
of beat himself up about him because he's like, this
isn't quite right. But I almost get the impression that
to him, they were right, but he just he was
kind of adjusting his interpretation of them based on the
(27:33):
feedback he was getting from everybody else, Like he was
subsuming his feelings about it to everybody else's dislike of it, Like, yeah,
you're right, it's not very good kind of thing. It
seemed to be specific to those starry knights.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, And just how tough was that, as someone who
obviously was extremely talented and producing what would be some
of the most beloved works of art after his death,
to constantly be getting that feedback from art credit and
although he wasn't even on the radar really art critics,
but people who he would show to. And then his
own brother who was such a supporter, but had to
(28:08):
constantly break the news of like nobody wants to buy this.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Stuff, right, And Vincent was like, but do you have
to tell me, like verbatim, how much they said they
hated it every time? Can you just tell me you
didn't sell any of this week?
Speaker 1 (28:20):
This guy said it looked like snot on canvas. I
don't know what to tell you, right.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
And also again if you take into account Chuck that
he's not just like trying to do a still life
photo realistically and not quite getting it. So it's like
your expertise isn't that good. He's like putting himself on
the canvas and people are rejecting it. So they're rejecting
him as a human being as far as he's concerned.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah, for sure. So he's in the Yellow House that
said he would rent it out to other artists. One
of those, thanks to THEO, ended up being Go Gone
because THEO was like, hey, listen, can I pay your
expenses and you go move in with my brother because
I really think it will. I think the quote was
it'll make a big change in your life. And he,
(29:07):
you know, he was hoping that one would inspire the
other because obviously he was wrapping them both, but he
wanted good things for Vincent and that that sort of worked,
and it didn't like they were both very productive. They
painted each other's portraits very famously, but they also fought
a lot. It was just a very volatile relationship to
(29:27):
the point where on Christmas Eve eighteen eighty eight, go
Gon was already planning on leaving. This wasn't the impetus
for him to leave, but Van Go threw a glass
of absinthe in his face, which I imagine, I mean, no
liquor in your face is great. Imagine absence is probably
one of the worst ones to get thrown in your face. Shirt. Yeah,
it probably stings, I would imagine. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
So Gogan was like, I'm out of here, and he left,
and Van Goh was like, hey, you can't leave. I'm leaving,
and he threatened him with a razor. Apparently, as far
as the standard story goes, Gogan kept going and Van
Go returned to the house, used the razor to cut
(30:11):
his ear off, wrapped it up, and took it to
a sex worker at a local brothel, and was rejected
by her. From this gift was rejected by her that is,
there's some problems with that, but it's probably the correct story.
(30:31):
But there's another school thought that Gogan actually cut it
off and van Go covered for him, because Gogan was
apparently a master sword fighter, carried a sword around with him,
and it's quite possible he took Vincent's ear off for
being threatened with a razor right.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Also another version of the story, they believe they found
that the woman was actually a maid at the brothel
and not a sex worker. But those are sort of
nitpicky details. I think certainly cutting off your own ear
wouldn't beat nitpicky, because that's a you know, a true
sign of a desperate sort of sort of upset that
(31:07):
you can only feel if you're suffering from severe mental illness.
So yeah, yeah, self mutilation is super sad. And I
think there's also like some interpretations that it might have
been influenced by the bullfighting ritual where you cut off
the bulls here to present it to a lady, But
I don't know, I'm not so sure about that.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, that seems like something he would have done on
like a calm day. Then if that was the purpose
of it, to present it to a lady. That almost
seems like it was just some impulsive thing that was
tacked on to the end of something that he wasn't planning.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
You know, yeah, for sure. But the cops found him
the next day. I think he was unconscious. They obviously
went to the hospital and he was in a state
of psychosis for a few days in the hospital, and
a doctor there said, you think you have epilepsy. So
and I don't think we mentioned you know, he's suffering
from from bouts of mental illness off and on throughout
(32:05):
his life to this point, but also physical manifestations are
happening that in retrospect people are like, yeah, it wasn't
just mental illness coming out physically, Like, it seems like
he probably really did have epilepsy. So they gave him
potassium bromide, which he said, Vincent said, curled or stopped
his intolerable hallucinations, but he was still fainting a lot.
(32:30):
And he apparently didn't have any memory of what happened
with Gogon or the ear.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, so he was in that hospital for a little while.
This wasn't a psychiatric hospital, this is like a hospital hospital.
I also saw a check in that documentary that as
a gift to the doctor who cared for him, he
presented him with a painting of one of the wards
in the hospital. When doctor was like, no, thanks, it's
not very good.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
So didn't even accept it.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Did not even accept it. Oh boy, So he was
released from the hospital. He pretended he was scratching its temple,
but it was with his middle finger as he was
saying bye to the doctor. Yeah, and he started painting again.
But the hospital visit helped his epilepsy, it did not
(33:18):
help the bouts of mental illness that he just kept
suffering over and over and over again. In between he
would just work at like a breakneck pace and then
exhaust himself, have another episode of mental illness and go
to the hospital, get out work until he exhausted himself
again and again, and so finally that the hospital was like, look, man,
(33:40):
you're in the wrong place now, like you need a
different kind of care than we could offer. And so
he checked himself into a sanitarium at Saint Remi and
he was there for a year being treated and that
actually helped him quite a bit being there.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
I think that's a good place for a break. Because
something very interesting happened while he was there. Is that
a good time?
Speaker 2 (34:03):
I think?
Speaker 1 (34:03):
So? All right, we'll be right back everybody. All right, everyone,
(34:24):
we're back in. I said, something very interesting happened while
he was in the sanitarium. And one thing I mentioned
earlier was he painted about eighteen paintings per month. He
produced one hundred and forty three paintings while he was
staying in this sanitarium, and one of which was not
a starry Night, but the Starry Night or just storry night.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Sure pretty impressive, huh.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
He said that he wrote in a letter I guess
that to his sister Wilhelmina, about him wanting to make
a starry night, and then in the the next breath,
he recommends she read Walt Whitman's poetry. And people went
and read song to myself and said, there's like two
stanzas in here that basically describe what starry Night looks like.
(35:12):
We think that Walt women essentially inspired this painting, and
that seems to be the consensus.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Yeah, And if you've never seen Starry Night, you should.
All you have to do is go to the Museum
of Modern Art in New York City and walk around
until you see crowds of people.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, they said it's their most visited painting in their
whole collection.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Yeah, it's uh, that one's you can't get close anyway,
but it's tough to even to get a great view period.
It's just there's a lot, a lot of folks around
that one.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Wow. Wow, Yeah, I would love to see that one.
I don't believe I ever have them.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Have you not seen that one?
Speaker 2 (35:47):
I don't believe. So I've been to MoMA, But that
seems like weird that I wouldn't have seen it. But
then again, why didn't I form a memory of seeing it?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Well, you also don't like crowds of people, so maybe
you were like, I don't know what's going on over there,
but no, thanks.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Well that is possible. But yeah, so I have seen
it on the internet at very least, if not in person.
And it's got swirls in it that represent the wind,
like the stars are huge and out of proportion and glowing.
The moon is all odd and it's like a landscape
at night. But he just captured all of it so perfectly,
(36:19):
and it's all a very it's the backgrounds very dark,
dark blues and stuff like that, but it's a very
soothing like happy painting. And this was what I was
talking about earlier that even THEO is like this, I
don't like this man, and I guess Vincent wrote that
he was once again allowing myself to do stars too big.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, he said, the search for style takes away the
real sentiment of things, which sounds a little bit like
a not form over fashion fashion over form or something
I don't know, like like just trying to make something
super stylistic, but it doesn't really mean anything, which I'm
sure cut pretty deeply. So while this is going on,
(37:04):
he you know, is continuing to kind of slip up
and down on his as far as his mental illness
is concerned. At some point he started to like eat paint.
Some people thought it might have been a suicidal thing,
but it might have also been pika as part of
his mental illness, which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
There's a legend that it was yellow paint that he
wanted to be happy inside, which doesn't I don't think.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Hold up, Yeah, Okay, Well, he because partially because of
that he stayed away from paint altogether for a little while,
because he also had a lot of like many many
drawings throughout his career and this is his drawing period.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, I like, way more drawings than paintings.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right, Oh, I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
So THEO and he got married I think in eighteen
eighty nine.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Maybe that sounds right to a woman named.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Joe Bonger or Boninger, who would eventually play a really
pivotal role in Vincent van Go's posthumous life. And they
honored him by naming their son, their only child, Vincent,
after the kid's uncle. And van Go was very, very
touched by this, and he painted one of my I
(38:16):
think one of the most beautiful paintings he ever did,
Almond Blossom.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I agree, buddy, it's great.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, just go look it up. It's very much in
like the Japanese style for sure. Yeah. And he painted
it for the baby, and like, despite you know, years
and decades of van Go paintings being sold by the family,
that one did not go up for sale, and it's
even in the van Go Museum still today.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Yeah. The baby didn't want it either though.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
He said, this is not very good.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Give up, spit up on it. I always hated bit term.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
It's a pretty bad term.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah. So THEO officially said, you know what, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna start really submitting your paintings, like I think
you are good and nobody knows it. So he started
really submitting at a more sort of serious rapid pace
in eighteen eighty eight, specifically at the annual Cilon de Independent.
(39:13):
In eighteen ninety, and this is just a few months
before Van Gowit would die. He was still not getting
any almost any attention, but finally in January that year
he started to get a little bit of not critical
like praise, but just people like critics looking at his
stuff and writing about his stuff. The first one, I
(39:35):
think was an art critic name Albert Aurier who published
I think the very first man Go Review, and he
said they initially appear strange, intense and feverish, but reflected
the continual search for the most essential sign of each thing.
So he was kind of getting it.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
I think, yeah, he was digging him. Yes. And then
in eighteen so I think eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty nine,
and eighteen ninety his work thanks to Theo, appeared in
the Salon in Paris. He was also featured in a
Belgian salon called le vent the twenty and this is
(40:12):
where he sold his first, his or his one and
only painting to somebody he didn't really.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Know, right, Yeah, it was a painter, another painter named
Anna Bach, and she bought the Red Vineyard, and that
I think maybe, well, I don't know if that was
the impetus, but that's when things started to pick up
a little bit. I think later that spring, the salon
showed ten of his paintings, which was a big deal.
(40:39):
May of that year, May of eighteen ninety and this
was after a year being in the sanitarium. He finally
was discharged and that's where he moved to a pretty
quiet place not too far from Paris, where he had
a good doctor on hand who was able to kind
of keep up with them. And that doctor was like, hey, man,
you know what you need to do is paint like
(41:00):
you seem to be doing best when you're really concentrating
on the painting, so you should do that. And he did.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah, he threw himself into it again. Like you were saying,
that last few months or the last year, he was
painting about a painting a day, and I've seen it,
like people say, almost as if he knew like his
time was running out and he wanted to get as
much out as he could. He focused a lot on
wheat fields, which he said earlier was one of his
favorite subjects. Apparently that represented like the sewing and the
(41:28):
reaping of it was like renewal and death and life
and birth and all that to him. And he was,
I guess pretty close to Paris and over and he
went and traveled once to visit THEO, and he found
that THEO was talking about going out, striking out on
his own, setting up his own art dealership, and Vincent
(41:50):
was like, man, that is to himself, he thought, this
is quite a risky gamble. You know what's going to
happen to my monthly stipend is that in jeopardy. But
also that will automatically make me a burden to my brother, Like,
even if he becomes successful, it's not going to be overnight.
And in that time between him taking this big risk
(42:11):
and becoming a success, I'm going to be an even
bigger burden than I am. That was something he.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Concluded, Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that was in July
of eighteen ninety and later that month, on July twenty seventh,
he shot himself in the chest and took his own life.
We covered that in more detail in the what was
it Mysteries of the Art world?
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah seven, no, wait five Mysteries of the Art twenty
twenty white.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Yeah, so you can go get that full story there.
But yeah, it was I think they He didn't die immediately,
and THEO made it from Paris to be there with
him when he died a couple of days later.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Which is so sweet. I mean they were so tight.
They're actually buried next to one another in that town.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah. Tight, but also fraud. You know, there a lot
of arguing stuff too, but.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
That's brother but that was mostly from Vincent's side, right.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Well, I mean I just you know, saw it could
be a rough relationship, but again as brothers and also
business partners, and one had a real tough time with
mental illness, so none of it is unexpected.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
So again, it's very much bandied about that Van Goh
was unknown and unappreciated in his time, and generally that's true.
But like when he was showing at the salons, other
painters like Monet would say to Theo, like, tell your
brother that his was the best work at the salon,
like he's great. He had a claim with people who
(43:38):
knew what they were talking about, but generally he didn't.
The reason why we know of him today and the
reason why his genius is seen and valued is because
of Joe Bonger, his sister in law, who very shortly,
I think six months after Vincent died. THEO died. Some
(43:58):
say of a broken heart, some say of siphus, some
say of both, and she inherited like all of essentially
all of Vincent van Gogo's paintings.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, I mean this is kind of the h in
a way, sort of the hero of the story here,
because now with THEO gone and Vincent still having not
achieved great fame, you're left with Joe to do something.
And you know, she was like, listen, I don't have
a background in this. This was my husband's line. So
(44:30):
she taught herself. She devoted to herself to studying art.
She devoted herself to studying the business of art, and
she really worked tirelessly to after his death, raise his profile.
And I get the impression that wasn't like, oh, I
got all these paintings so I can get a lot
of money. It was like to honor someone she thought
(44:51):
was really talented.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yes, absolutely, Yeah, she wanted to make sure that he
was appreciated finally, even if it wasn't in his lifetime.
She she had a hard time going at first, like
she still couldn't quite convince people. I guess she was
just being like, look see it's good, it's good, and
that wasn't taking. So she went through the letters between
THEO and Vincent that THEO had kept and realized, like
(45:14):
he talks van Goh talks a lot about like his
style is technique, his inspiration, his mental health struggles in
these letters and she was like, this is how you
interpret Vincent Vango's work. You understand his background, his biography,
his struggles, and that now is just so commonplace and ubiquitous.
That's just part of learning about art. And this is
(45:36):
where it came from. It came from Joe Bonger trying
to get people to understand Vincent van Gogh.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, which is I never knew that. It's a super
cool kind of cherry on this story that when you
go and you read about the artists and that just
adds so much more to it. That came from her idea,
which is pretty amazing. She got up initially a critic
named Jan Veth who did not love the pay. But
then after the letters, that's when Yan came around and
(46:04):
was swayed and was like, he really quote seeks the
raw root of things. And I think, you know, once
they knew this story, they were like, oh my gosh,
this is this tortured human that put everything into these
paintings and now I'm seeing them in a different light.
And that was that was it. I think. Since her
death in nineteen twenty five, you know, his paintings have
sold to the tune of about one hundred and seventeen
(46:25):
million dollars. The bang Go Museum there in Amsterdam, which
I have been to, it's well worth a trip, opened
in nineteen seventy three, gets a couple of million visitors
every year, and he's one of the most famous painters
of all time. Now.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Yeah, and one of the reasons why I saw was
because he wore his heart on his sleeve. He did
the same thing with his painting, and people just connect
with that. And I mean, just from listening to this Chuck,
I imagine a lot of people were like, yeah, he
really was kind of a neat guy. Yeah, a tortured
artist too. And that's another place where this kind of
came from. The idea of somebody suffering for their art
(47:05):
and their art being great because of their struggles with
mental illness. That also kind of came from the profile
of van Go being raised at the same time. And
over time people have been like, well, what did he
suffer from? Specifically? We don't really know, but there are
some clues here there that kind of point in a
(47:25):
couple of directions.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah, for sure, I think everyone agrees, like I said earlier,
that he was epileptic, but you know, probably bipolar disorder
is what a lot of people agree on. Possibly schizophrenia.
You know, he talked about hallucinations and stuff like that.
He also drank a lot, which definitely did not help
along the way. He did not in his like previous
(47:50):
family history at least as far as anyone knows, have
a long documented history of mental illness, but one of
his sisters was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was in an
asylum I think a few years after Vincent died. And
he had a brother named Cornelius who died in South
Africa while serving in the army, and it is speculated
(48:13):
that he may have taken his own life as well.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
Right, you have a ten percent chance of having schizophrenia
if one of your siblings doesn't. For people in general population,
it's just one percent, So that definitely increased the possibility.
Before we finished, Chuck, I just want to briefly mention
that anecdote that was in that one article I sent
you about that cafe being foreclosed on with all of
(48:36):
his paintings trapped inside. Oh yeah, so he was showing
like I think they said, one hundred paintings or something
in this cafe. It was like an exhibit of van
Go like early van Go stuff when he first moved
to Paris, and the cafe owner like wasn't making their payments,
so the cafe got foreclosed on, locked up, and everything inside,
including Vango's paintings, which were not owned by the cafe,
(48:58):
were auctioned off, and they were so disliked that they
were bundled together in bunches of ten so that people
who bought them could go and scrape the paintings off
and sell them at a higher price than they bought
the ten van Goes for as blank canvases. Wow, And
he still was just like, well, I guess I needed
(49:19):
to just get up and dust myself up. Yeah, he
was like the Joe Dirt of the nineteenth century French
and Dutch art world. I never saw that same thing.
He was essentially a van Go. Okay, all right, okay,
thanks for humoring me with that one.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
Because that's just I love it. Good story.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
All right, Well, Chuck said that was a good story,
So I think we should end this on a high
note and go straight to listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
This is about the seven thirty seven macs. Hey, guys,
love the show. Been listening for a few years. I'm
an embedded control software engineer, not for Boeing, but in
another industry where mistakes could kill people. For me, Boeing
was allway an aspirational company, so watching the news on
mcast was like meaning a disappointing drunk hero. At the time,
(50:07):
my peers and I were following the news and doing
our best to read between the lines. We were frankly
disgusted to see that they actually deployed a single point
of failure all the way to production. It was baffling
to us because we knew our internal processes would have
stopped a program dead with that much risk. Surely Boeing
held even higher standards. It was clear that a complete
cultural and ethical breakdown occurred to allow the mcast to
(50:29):
exist without redundancy and sensor voting or rationality checks and
voting as in quotes. Even worse, they allowed a helper
system enough control authority to destabilize the vehicle. It's antithetical
to the control's engineering title anyway. Certainly didn't expect to
reignite professional rage on my commute today. Guys. So that
(50:52):
was a ten out of ten episode, and that is
from Travis. Last name withheld nice.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Travis, somebody who knows that they're talking about gave us
a ten out of ten.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
Chuck, Yeah, that always feels nice.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
I assume there's a would recommend after that, I hope.
So I'm going to assume that Travis works in the
law and dart industry.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Right there you go.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
If you want to be like Travis and send us
an awesome email because you're an expert and something we
talked about. We love that kind of stuff. Even if
you're like you guys kind of got this wrong, that's
all right, We want to hear from you. Send us
an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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